It's Becoming Clear Just How Vast The Censorship Of Google Is Going To Be

Google chief legal officer David Drummond said on Thursday that
the search giant has started removing links to 250,000 web pages
since a new "right to be forgotten" law was introduced in May.
That's 125,000 web pages disappearing from Google every month.
About 70,000 people have requested links mentioning their names
be removed,
he wrote in a column for The Guardian.

Google opposed the new law mandating that links to stories be
removed even if they are true, but now says it must
abide by the rule. As
Google's online form for link removal requests shows, the
standard for deleting links is not whether the web pages are
accurate or true. It's much more vague and subjective that that.
The standard is: "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant,
or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were
processed." The law doesn't apply to the web pages themselves,
only search engine links to them.

While the links may be upsetting for some of the people mentioned
in those stories, hiding researchers' ability to locate the
stories through Google is akin to removing the card catalog
system from a library while leaving the books in place. The
removal process is haphazard and imperfect, Drummond says:

So we now have a team of people reviewing each application
individually, in most cases with limited information and almost
no context.

Kelly Osborne is
disappearing from Google.Jason
Kempin/Getty

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land has a great dissection of
just how haphazard this process can be — and how it can make
legitimate information that no one is complaining about suddenly
disappear from Google. If two people have the same name, then
links to both parties can disappear. And it's not just name
searches, it's links to other words associated with those names
that are vanishing too, Sullivan says:

To understand, let’s assume there’s someone named “Emily White”
who doesn’t like that a search for her name on Google brings up
information about her having gone bankrupt.

White, who let’s say lives in London, makes a request for Google
to drop the links under the EU’s Right To Be Forgotten mandate.
Google grants this. As a result, the links would no longer show
up for these situations:

1) Searches for just “emily white”

2) Searches for her name plus other words, such as “emily white
bankrupt” or “emily white london”

Any search involving her name along with other words would have
the forgotten links filtered out. White wouldn’t have to provide
a list of descriptive terms to go along with her name. Just the
presence of her name in a search would be enough to trigger the
filtering.

Does the information involve criminal convictions where time
is still being served?

Is the information published by a government?

On its own, the third criterion should be chilling: "Is the
information recent?" It suggests that vast chunks of the past, no
matter how crucial or interesting, will suddenly become much more
difficult to locate.